ABSTRACT
Like Collinson, Peter Lake has found a good deal of consensus between puritans and non-puritans in the Elizabethan Church. Like Tyacke, he finds agreement on a Calvinist view of grace as the theological basis for this consensus. And like both, he finds the Arminian and Laudian threats after the accession of Charles to have been calamitous for the unity of the Church. A close look at his work, though, reveals that he has not thereby abandoned either puritanism or the high road. He adds to the usual array of religious issues-anti-popery, predestination, preaching-a more fundamental question dividing the Church of England from its very foundation: How can an inclusive, national church be established on a theology that assumes a distinction between the elect and the reprobate? Puritans, who perceived themselves to be elect and attempted to act out their election with pious and disciplined behaviour (‘practical divinity’), were committed to further reforming the state church from within, not separating themselves from it. But the tension implicit in their understanding of the true church as the community of the godly necessarily surfaced as they combated enemies of reform within the visible churchespecially when those enemies denied predestinarian theology.
